When Do You Sharpen?

My photography instructor is telling the class to set their cameras up with no sharpening and to set Adobe Bridge defaults for no sharpening. He wants us to apply sharpening only as the last step in our PP workflow. Is this a common practice?

Yes it is common practice, but there is a slight exception to it. Most digital cameras employ an anti-aliasing filter that introduces some softness. Modern sharpening software adds a "capture sharpen" stage that would be the first thing to apply when your image is in Photoshop. It is very slight and helps eliminate this initial/intentional softness.
Either way - sharpening should be a carefully controleld process, applied with different settings/techniques for different images, purposes, and outputs. I completely agree that it should not be done in-camera or in the raw converter where the effect will be applied evenly to all images and to all areas of the image.

Guy

Guy is right on the mark, but I want to add one very important point. Using in-camera sharpening does have a useful purpose. The image that is displayed on the camera LCD during review is a processed jpeg based on the user defined settings. Applying a moderate amount of in-camera sharpening can help you to evaluate the sharpness of the image (within reason). You can overide this in RAW conversion to output an unsharpened TIF file easy enough.

BTW, there's a couple more directly related threads on this subject a little farther down the page:

Capture Sharpening
How much work in RAW

yep,
read those threads Bob mentioned. And I follow exactly what Guy is saying. Check this, it aint a great pic but my 'Digital-Entry' is just 48 hours old, . I printed an A4 and it looks nice with the mentioned flow.

Bob Steele, I have noticed that the image on the LCD doesn't show the sharpness I will get when I convert the RAW file. I don't know if I can affect the sharpness of that little preview jpeg with my camera though (it's a Fuji, not a Canon). I guess I'll just do the experiment...

Pete D.

Your teachers and Guy Tal advice is correct, The sharpening is always the last step that I apply to the print photo. If you take this final sharpened photo and reduce it to a web format for posting on this forum you will need to re-sharpen after the image as been compressed and downsized. I find at this stage the level of sharpening applied is usually half or lest of the original amount applied to the final image for printing.

I'll have to try Bob's process it sound interesting.

Keep in mind that this the process that I use others may have a different process.

Cheers,

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Kelly,,, Yes, it is a common prectice with most pros who do not want ANYTHING interfearing with their total control of an image. Every one I know personally does not even sharpen as a final step in the original image work. Sharpening is ONLY done with an image just BEFORE it is printed, and then after printing it is NOT saved. Some will copy the original, sharpen and print from that, and then trash it so as not to even have the posibility of changing the original, which is really the safest way to go. Sharpening, if not done right, can do more damage than it helps, but you won't ever find out until it is printed.